


throw away the fear in your eyes

by towokuwusatsuwu



Category: Kamen Rider Ex-Aid
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, First Dates, First Kiss, M/M, Mentions of Death, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-29
Packaged: 2019-03-11 01:41:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13514106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/towokuwusatsuwu/pseuds/towokuwusatsuwu
Summary: Kiriya finds a patient's son sitting in the hospital break room and makes an impromptu offer. Taking Dan Kuroto out on a date might be his best sudden idea yet.





	throw away the fear in your eyes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gulpereel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gulpereel/gifts).



Being a coroner means dealing less with living patients and more with grieving relatives than anything else, something Kujo Kiriya has learned in his years as a doctor. He knows the expressions all too well; the people whose faces crumple the moment they see their loved one dead on a slab, the repressed grief in the eyes of people who don’t want to break down in front of him.

He’s less surprised to find the slightly familiar man sitting at the break room table and more surprised at the haunted expression in his eyes as he stares down at the table top. Family members of terminal patients are known to take a moment in here. Kiriya knows the staff allows it.

Usually, he keeps to himself. Today, he takes a seat across from the man. “You okay, man?”

He tries to remember where he’s seen this face before when the man slowly shakes himself, lifting his head slowly, his expression guarded before he manages to plaster on a smile. It’s fake, and the raw pain in his eyes still overpowers any other part of his face; Kiriya has learned how to detect it without even having to try. He deals in death every day it seems and he sees faces like this one all the time. Even when you know someone you love is dying, the suffering does not decrease. The impact is still too powerful for most people to handle.

“I’m fine. It’s just been a long week, and my mother…” He trails off and shakes his head once more, and Kiriya already knows the rest of the sentence anyway. His mother is sick, probably closer to dying than she is to getting well. “My apologies if I’m disturbing you. My name is Dan Kuroto of Genm Corporation. You might have heard of us.”

Genm Corporation. So that’s where he knows this man’s face from; there had been a press release airing on television a few days ago when Kiriya had taken a break. Something about a newly developed game. “Can’t say I’m much of a gamer but yeah, I know of you.”

“We’re having a fairly successful year, so that’s not surprising.” Another person would have sounded more excited at the prospect of success, but Kuroto’s voice is hollow all the way through as if it means nothing to him right now. “You’re a doctor here?”

“Kujo Kiriya. I’m the coroner.” It’s probably not the best way to introduce himself, but still.

“The coroner. That would explain why I don’t recognize you.” Kuroto tries for another smile, and it’s still pinched and heavy on his face. “I’ve gotten to know a lot of the doctors here.”

Of course he has. “I spend most of my time down in my space, y’know. Usually I take breaks down there, too, but I got tired of that and decided to come up for a breath of fresh air.”

He cracks open the soft drink he’d selected out of the fridge and takes a sip, watching Kuroto’s face as he deals with that influx of information. It’s a joke, one made in poor taste at that, but it always finds its way to the tip of Kiriya’s tongue in the worst of circumstances and this is apparently no different. Finally, Kuroto chuckles and runs a hand over his face, and Kiriya supposes he must have accepted the joke even if he doesn’t much care for it.

Death is death. He sees it every day. His sense of humor is bound to be affected, right?

“It’s been a long time since one of you doctors has talked to me like a normal person,” Kuroto says.

“The others are just trying to be nice, y’know, they don’t always realize that a person can only take that poor pitying tone for so long before wanting to snap.” How many people had talked to him like that after Jungo died? He doesn’t even want to think back to try and count.

Kuroto nods, folding his hands neatly on the table in front of him. “I already hear it enough at work from the people I work with. It would be nice to have a break from it, you know?”

“I do, yeah. Been more or less in the same boat once.” He doesn’t offer details because the last thing he wants to do is bring Kuroto down more than he’s clearly already down. That doesn’t help anyone, after all. “Surprised you can hang out here long enough to get admission into the break room with a job like yours.”

“I try to come see her at least once a day if I can manage, and I never go two days without seeing her.” Kuroto makes an unpleasant face, and Kiriya frowns. “My father, on the other hand…”

The word drips from his lips drenched in poison and bitterness and Kiriya bites back a small grin at that; he’d met plenty of people with family issues since taking a job at this hospital and it’s even more obvious than the loss already following Kuroto like a shadow. His father must not visit very often, and he’d probably only be this pissed about if it his parents were still together. Kiriya has to admit, that does sound pretty poor on his father’s part but he doesn’t say it out loud. The last thing he needs to do is stick his nose into someone else’s family drama, after all.

Family drama in rich families sounds about right, though. Kiriya had been the recipient of plenty of misplaced hurled verbal abuse from families who had problems that not even their vast amount of wealth could fix; in fact, sometimes, it seemed like money was causing most of the problems in the first place. This hospital is the best in the area, the nicest and the most expensive; he’s willing to bet Kuroto’s father was footing the bill for his mother’s stay in an expensive private room and counting that as good enough care for his wife.

“You got work after this?” Kiriya asks, trying to change the subject to something lighter. Kuroto sounds like he has more than enough hell to deal with without someone else reminding him of it.

“Not today. Everything that needed to be done today, I did at my desk this morning and in my car on the way over here. Juggling work and hospital visits is difficult.” Kuroto sighs and Kiriya hears the weight in the sound. “Once her afternoon medication comes, she’ll sleep for a long time. Which is good, she needs it. I’ll probably just go back home for the day.”

“Sounds boring.” Kiriya pulls the tab off of his drink to fiddle with it. “How about we do something?”

He can only imagine how hard the rest of the staff would have come down on him for suggesting such a thing, but Kiriya isn’t good at keeping his mouth shut and he thinks that Kuroto probably just needs to get away from everything for a little bit. If he’s been going back and forth between work and the hospital since his mother got sick— something that seems likely based on the way he’s been talking— then he’s probably not had a single moment to himself. Running a company the size of Genm can’t be stress free, and waiting for his mother to die, well…

Kuroto wings an eyebrow at him. “Do something? What exactly are you talking about?”

“Go out. Like a date. There’s a nerdy guy down in pediatrics who goes to this arcade with his boyfriend sometimes, sounds fun.” Kiriya has never been and would never go on his own, but he doesn’t need to broadcast that right now. “You like games, right? And there’s good food.”

“Getting asked out on a date at the hospital. I can’t say you’re the first person to do that, but.” Kuroto looks thoughtful for a moment while Kiriya wonders which member of the staff has already played this card. “You know what? It sounds fun. When do you get off work?”

Kiriya doesn’t care which staff member it was because he’s the one of them that succeeded.

* * *

Kuroto’s mother ends up falling asleep right around the time Kiriya gets off of work, and he’s lucky he thought to bring a change of clothes with him today. Work can be messy even when you’re a professional and though he knows bringing clothes with him every time is for the best, he still fails to remember most of the time. Not today, though, which is extra lucky.

He holds Emu up in the hallway for the address to the arcade before heading downstairs to meet up with Kuroto.

Kuroto already looks nice, probably the result of someone with enough money to look nice constantly, all long legs in black suit pants with a matching blazer over a burgundy V-neck. It’s businessy, but when he shrugs out of the jacket, he looks casual enough. Still nicer than Kiriya in dark jeans and one of his favorite Hawaiian print button-ups, but fuck it. It’s an arcade.

“You ready?” Kiriya asks him. “I’ve got a car, I can drive you unless you want to get your driver.”

“You can drive, that works for me,” Kuroto says, and Kiriya smirks and tips his head back at him. “What is it? Why are you looking at me like that? Did I say something?”

Kiriya shakes his head. “Nah. Just be glad I bring a second helmet with me just in case.”

He doesn’t tell Kuroto the second helmet used to be his best friend’s and that he can’t quite shake the urge he has to bring it with him every day. It was a regular staple because some mornings when it was nice out, he would pick Jungo up a little early and they would take a scenic route into the city so they could enjoy the cool morning air.

Kuroto walks around his bike a few times with raised eyebrows and a little smile on his lips like he approves, and Kiriya is glad for that because the motorcycle had cost him an arm and a leg and years of careful savings. He had wanted one ever since he was a kid and he had endeavored to get his hands on one as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

“It’s beautiful,” Kuroto tells him, and Kiriya beams at him as he straddles the seat, slipping his helmet on and securing it. “Do I just put the helmet on and get on the back here?”

“Yeah,” Kiriya looks over his shoulder at him. “There’s places to hold on at the back or you can hold onto me. It’s up to you on what you want to do.”

He doesn’t say anything when Kuroto’s arms slip around his waist, a little tighter than is comfortable and ample evidence that Kuroto has never been on a bike before. That’s fine for Kiriya; the experience is always exciting the first time around and it’ll be good distraction, right?

“Just hold on tight and I’ll get us there in one piece,” he promises, and Kuroto laughs.

It had been a long time since Kiriya had someone on the back of his bike riding with him anywhere; he had mostly blown off the few people who had dared to ask him for a ride and had never asked anyone to ride with him. He had his own way to grieve, he supposes. But when he rides out of the garage into the sunlight and the fresh air, he has to admit that having a pair of arms around his waist and someone at his back is a nice change to the monotony of always riding alone with no one but the sound of his bike engine for company.

It had been a nice sensation to get used to because his bike meant the world to him and so much of his money had been poured not into just the purchase but the upkeep, only the best gas for his bike, only the best of everything. New paint jobs, regular cleaning, check-ups. Letting someone onto his bike was a big deal. This, though… This feels nice.

The arcade isn’t as far away from the hospital as Kiriya would have expected, which is good because long distance directions kill him and he relies on his cell phone for that. He finds the place with little to no trouble and they take their helmets in with them because Kiriya isn’t looking to lose anything important to him. Kuroto’s face is just slightly flushed when he takes his helmet off, and his hair is rumpled attractively. Kiriya wants to run his fingers through that.

“Have fun?” he asks, and for the first time today, Kuroto’s eyes have light dancing in them.

The arcade itself is darker where the games are and brighter near the bar and the handful of tables and booths throughout the rest of the building. Kiriya claims a booth for them and leaves Kuroto to sit, heading to the bar to put in orders for food and drinks. He finds himself glancing over at Kuroto a few times, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips as he watches Kuroto trace his fingers over the contours of the bike helmet. He had really enjoyed it, then.

The food is messy but good and the beer tastes just right with it, and Kuroto looks good licking cheese off of his long fingers. He has a sense of humor, too, which makes Kiriya choke on his food more than once when a joke catches him unawares. He’d set the bar low for a rich boy like Kuroto, and apparently he had underestimated Kuroto quite a bit in doing so.

“Does your company make arcade games?” he finds himself asking when they’ve finished their food, glancing toward the other half of the room, seeming almost endless from his position.

“A few, yeah, the revenue isn’t usually incredibly high these days but I’ve got a soft spot for arcades.” Kuroto positively glows as he speaks; Kiriya had called this one perfectly.

A couple of beers makes him braver than he has any right to feel. “Pick one of them out. If I can beat the high score on it in at least three rounds, then you give me a kiss.”

“Oh?” Kuroto raises both eyebrows at him but grins. “That sounds like a deal. C’mon.”

Kiriya is shit at games most of the time, lacking the hand-eye coordination and the ability to keep cool under pressure that makes him so good at his job. He’d thought about asking Emu what made gaming so different— Emu had been something of a legend before he went to med school, and Kiriya is curious— but right now, he’s determined to prove he can hack it.

“You might be good at this one,” Kuroto announces, stopping at a machine with  _ Dangerous Zombie _ emblazoned on the side in bloody script. “You just have to kill zombies.”

Kiriya makes a doubtful face at the screen of the game but finally nods, slapping a bill in Kuroto’s hand as he sits himself down at the console. “Go get me some coins. I got this.”

He doesn’t have this, as it turns out, and he dies within five minutes of the first round, his jaw dropping when a zombie comes seemingly out of nowhere to bite his face off. The expression he wears must be comical because Kuroto laughs, throwing his arms around the back of Kiriya’s chair, leaning on it for balance.

In all fairness, this is bullshit and the game is far more difficult than just shooting zombies like Kuroto claimed. Kiriya steels himself and inserts more tokens, telling himself to just stay calm and pay attention to the screen, every last pixel of it. If the spastic kids milling around the place can play something like this, then he damn sure ought to have the skill to pull it off.

He lasts a fifteen minutes this time, nearing the top score, taking deep breaths and letting his eyes dart all over the screen without glancing down at the controls once. There are a few near misses when his hand slips the wrong way and he doesn’t know the controls well enough to  _ never _ look at them but he also can’t afford to look at them when he has seemingly thirty-seven thousand zombies trying to hunt him down and  _ eat _ him, how the fuck is this even fair?

“People can’t play this and actually win. Whoever got that top score cheated,” Kiriya says, and he’s close to just calling the bet off and walking off because he hasn’t had this many issues with a game in a long time. When he looks over at Kuroto, he scoffs; Kuroto has a hand clamped tight over his mouth, his eyes shining with mirth. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m going to win this time and I’m gonna take that top spot. You can bet cash on it.”

“No amount of money is going to match the bruising your ego is about to take,” Kuroto says.

Kiriya gets close this time, and that’s somehow all the more humiliating; if he had scored super low and died within mere minutes, he would have felt better about it than he does by missing the top score within ten points. He groans and drops his head into his hands, thoroughly done with this. If his wrist hadn’t twitched he could have taken out two at once… If he had just been a little more steady when those four came from around the corner…

As soon as he stands up, though, Kuroto slides into the seat, settling into the cracked leather like he owns the place, like he’s done this a million times before— he has to have, now that Kiriya thinks about it, because the man makes games for a living and he had made  _ this _ game. That’s admirable, now that Kiriya thinks about it. The game had been riveting even if he had fucked himself out of beating the high score three times in a row.

“I’ll take pity on you,” Kuroto tells him. “When I beat the high score, you can still have the kiss.”

Before Kiriya gets a chance to come up with a comeback, Kuroto starts the game, sets his hands on the controllers, and his expression changes. He’s focused in a way that Kiriya could never be, not looking down at his hands once and yet still operating the controls with grace and experience. Within ten minutes, other people gather around to watch him play.

“Holy shit,” one kid says, and Kiriya glances over at him, at his wide eyes and awed expression.

The girl next to him thumps him on the shoulder and shakes her head at him. “What do you expect? That’s  _ Dan Kuroto. _ The head of Genm is bound to be good at a game he  _ made. _ ”

Kuroto does not die. Instead, he beats the game in the amount of time it had taken Kiriya to lose three times and leans back with a self-satisfied smirk on his face as he enters his name into the scoreboard. His impromptu cheer section goes up in shouts and applause and Kuroto laughs, twisting around to look at them, half-surprised and half-eating it up.

“You’re really something else,” Kiriya tells him, and Kuroto looks up at him with an amused smile on his lips and something dark but not sad in his eyes. “Thanks for taking pity on me.”

Kuroto grins, then, all teeth. “I got the top score. You still want that kiss, then?”

They leave the game behind and outside, in the dark— the entire day had gone by without Kiriya noticing, which says a lot about how much he enjoyed Kuroto’s company— he pulls Kuroto down by the neck of his shirt and kisses him so hard Kuroto whimpers and grips his shoulders so tight his fingers dig in a little. It hurts, but it’s good at the same time.

“You’re gonna take me home?” Kuroto asks, holding his helmet beneath his arm casually.

“‘Course I am. Get on.” Kiriya mounts the bike and waits for Kuroto to slide on behind him before he guns the engine. “Hold on tight and I’ll show you what a good fast ride is like this time.”

Kuroto chuckles at him. “I wouldn’t expect anything different from you at this point.”

The house that Kuroto keeps is massive and tucked away from everything else, the perfect place for Kiriya to speed to without too many people around to see him breaking a few speed limit laws in the process. It’s worth it, though, when Kuroto slips off of the back of his bike with his legs a little shaky beneath him. Like a true gentleman, Kiriya walks Kuroto to his front door. It’s only the right thing to do after a first date, right?

This time, Kuroto leans down into his personal space and Kiriya kisses him right on the mouth, not as rough or hard but warm and soft, a goodbye with maybe room for more. They linger there for a moment, Kuroto’s arms loosely draped over his shoulders with Kiriya’s hand pressed into his waist, not wanting to let him go just yet even though he needs to get home.

“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow,” Kuroto muses, and Kiriya grins up at him and nods. He does have work, after all.

When he gets back home, he has to admit to himself that it might have been impromptu, but it had been nice. He wants to see more of Dan Kuroto, definitely. Tomorrow has promise.


End file.
